A year?!

Some might think “it's only been a year?” but to me it feels like the year flew by.
When I announced snõwkit on 30 September 2014, it turned out to be everything I'd been hoping for and went well above the expectations I'd set for the community.

This post covers both the last year and the one ahead.

Part one - growing

From today, I'll be allowing the community to throw money at snõwkit projects.

To my surprise, a number of people have offered to give me money for the work I am doing in the collective and for Haxe. However, the timing of people supporting the projects financially is important – especially to show the community who I am, and how I work, and how the community works.

Over the past year and a bit, we've done a lot together! We have a bunch we can point at to show that myself and the community are committed to doing great things, and to doing them well. Not just for ourselves but for Haxe, as that's part of our purpose as a collective. The community members have especially stepped up - You've shown that there is interest in making this an awesome place to be.

With that in mind, I've created a Patreon page.
It covers transparently and in detail why I think it makes sense,
and what you would be contributing toward.

I really appreciate if you spread word about this,
I think it will lead to great things.

Part two - community posts

It would be silly to have a nice neat time frame behind us and not consider things we did well, and things we did poorly for the sake of the community. I think, largely, everything went really well. There's stuff we'll iterate and tweak as we go as a community but nothing major to note.

Personally, though, I tried to do a lot of stuff on my own that I could have gotten help with from the community – specifically posts here on the site.

This is part of what I mentioned in dev log 8,
I've since gathered a couple of community members (±5) that are going to do a few community focused posts a month, alongside me. For a good example of a community post, check out dev log 6, or some of the LD recap posts.

These posts are quite fun to write and the community makes a bunch of awesome things so I want to make sure we keep them up. So, in the very near future look out for community posts not by me, and keep on making cool stuff so we have a lot to go on :D

Part three - year #1 review

Finally, I'd like to share some of the stats that I could gather for interest sake.

One thing that's pretty important to note from my perspective is that – I'm not all that interested in chasing numbers. Whether there are 1000 of us or 5 of us the vision and mission are the same.

At the same time though, it's pretty important to keep a handle on what we're trying to achieve, and being wise about our timing and strategy with regards to building together. It would be foolish to not consider the future, or monitor our health, that way we can adapt and prepare well.

snowkit.org

199 users signed up

112 posts published

9 dev logs

Note: Around April I switched to GoSquared full time because Google Analytics was being overrun with fake views, it makes it impossible to filter them, and it's become a wreck since their focus is on ads. This means we have two sets of data.

GoSquared timeline (with limited/rss based posts from site shown):

The users and pageviews from GoSquared (Apr 2015 - Nov 2015)

Here's what Google Analytics shows.
This is the full time frame, from Sept 29 2014 - Nov 19 2015

snowkit.org/chat

Not every user that signed in once is obviously active,
but the total of 281 people showing interest in chatting is nice.

github

This is tricky since Github doesn't show traffic or cloning history past the current month, unfortunately. The rest of the info is public anyway so here's a brief summary of the main repos.

luxe/snow/flow +35 contributors, ~1012 commits, +233/112/58 stars

snowkit org +18 repositories, ~906 commits, 11 people

conclusion

All in all, it's been a really fun and fulfilling year (and a bit).

Even though most of the libraries are in alpha still, we've had a couple of releases on a few platforms and a couple bigger ones heading out – I'm definitely encouraged by the state so far.

I'm looking forward to pushing forward, and I do so appreciate everyone sticking around and contributing while we build stuff.